My Lords, I support the amendments standing in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and other noble Lords. I have listened to noble Lords, so I am not going to repeat what has been said. I pay my respects to the family because as someone who is still going through the criminal justice system, I absolutely feel the anguish of these families.
While we are talking about a digital platform, we are also talking about human lives, and that is what we have to remain focused on. I am not a techno, and all these words in the digital world sound like a lot of Japanese to me. I am not ignorant about what noble Lords are saying, but it has made me realise that, while we have gone forward, for a lot of people and families it still feels like wading through jelly.
I want to speak about how the families will feel and how they will connect through all of these gateways to get what they should quite rightly have about their loved ones’ lives and about what has been said about them online. Surely the platforms should have a duty of care, then perhaps we would not be here discussing
these amendments. Noble Lords have spoken about the technical aspects of these amendments. By that, we mean data and the role of the coroner. As a former victims’ commissioner, I had many discussions with the Chief Coroner about other victims who have suffered loss as well. I think that people do not understand how victims’ families feel in the courtroom because you feel alone, and I imagine there are more legal aspects from these mega companies than these families can afford.
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I hope that when the Minister comes to the Dispatch Box it is good, but there are lots of other things. We need to dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s to make sure that families feel that their voices are heard and that they get legal advice and information not just from the coroner but get copies of everything without extra charge.
I want to talk about a humane route for grieving parents and guardians to access data to understand more about the circumstances in which their children died. There is now, horribly, a number of cases, which we have pointed out, where these platforms have left parents in automated loops. They have described it as feeling like contacting a lost property department. Services have refused to engage with inquiries and have refused to appear at inquests. This leaves parents dealing with an already unimaginable situation with nowhere to turn, having to put the pieces together themselves. I am still going through that, and noble Lords cannot imagine the sheer frustration of looking at a blank wall, banging your head against a wall and thinking you have a support system in place but actually it just closes the door in your face.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has already highlighted the tragedies and issues of these families. In the hours after Olly Stephens was murdered, his parents, Amanda and Stuart Stephens, had to trawl through social media sites to get evidence. This is about their son. We are not talking about data protection; this is about human life. For the Bill to navigate and push forward to support these families, it has to have that humanity, that humane level, to go through and help them. It is all right setting it up to have digital companies comply with Ofcom and the coroner, but there still may be a huge gap to help these families navigate, understand, get the evidence, have copies and feel that we are talking about their loved ones. They are not actually having a voice to understand what emotions they are going through. As my noble friend Lady Morgan has just said, it took Molly Russell’s family five years, and then they were drowned in 36,000 pages of almost impenetrable data just 12 days before the original inquest. That caused a further five months’ delay. That is not acceptable. This is a further trauma for families.
The parents of Frankie Thomas, who took her life in 2018 aged 15, described their desperation in the aftermath of her death. Her mother Judy said she felt like she was in the wilderness contacting somebody at Instagram. I use social media, and I see many people’s sheer frustration at having no response from social media platforms. I agree we should have a single point of contact—a SPOT, as they are known in this world—to
help these families, but I would like that single point of contact to go even further. I want that for all victims of crime, but I also do not want it to hinder people if that person has gone on holiday or is off sick and nobody shares that information. We need to ensure that they have a lot of people trained on this who can pick it up. We have a system where the server is not looked at but blocks the families. What is the point of having a single point of contact if that person cannot give other members of staff access to that data to help families?
Grieving families must be given a humane route, facilitated by Ofcom, to access that information from all the platforms where their children have died. We cannot go back after all these experiences and all the energy that the families have put into campaigning for something that should quite rightly be there: information about their loved one. We should not have to have discussions in this place to get that information for families. It is inhumane and shameful and they should not have to go through it any more.
I look forward to listening to the Minister. I pay honour to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for the work she has done. I am glad that she has had conversations because I am still waiting for the Minister to answer my letters. These families should not be here fighting for justice for their loved ones. We should be trying to make their life a bit better, to give them a healthier lifestyle and to understand. I hope the Minister will come up with something good because if there are further gaps, we need to challenge him once again to ensure that we do not fail the families who are listening to us today.